Was John B. Watson Inspired by Anna Wyczółkowska and Her Studies in the Mechanism of Speech?

In 1913, an article by Anna Wyczółkowska entitled Theoretical and experimental studies in the mechanism of speech was published in the Psychological Review. It contains the results of her studies on internal speech and thought, which had been carried out by the author seven years earlier, in the psychological laboratory of the University of Chicago. John B. Watson was a participant in the study. Wyczółkowska believed that Watson was inspired by her research. Thanks to his participation, he gradually began to move away from his original interest in animal psychology, towards behaviourism. In his Behaviorist Manifesto published in the same year, Watson took, as one of the arguments for the rightness of his programme, the assumption that the thought process is really motor habits in the larynx, improvements, short cuts, changes, etc. According to Wyczółkowska, it was obviously inspired by her research. Her aforementioned article is still cited in the psychological literature today, and belongs to the canon of the most important early experimental studies in the field of research on thinking and speech processes. This text discusses the relationship between the research conducted by Wyczółkowska and some assumptions of behaviourism. Furthermore it presents the story of Wyczółkowska’s life, her scientific work, social commitment to women’s university education, and activities in the Polish American community.

Analysis Model for Identifying Negative Posts Based on Social Media

Cyberbullying is an act that violates where this crime is committed on social media, e.g. the Twitter application. This action is difficult to detect, thus someone has to report the case before detection. Identification of cyberbullying tweets aims to classify tweets containing the bullying content. Several studies gave output results in the identification of whether the tweet is positive or negative, or bully or not. It can be confusing when analyzing the classification results as it only results in two classes. In this research, by using the conception of text mining Naïve Bayes, the model that can categorize into more detail was developed. It does not only categorize the contents are bullying or not, however it can classify the contents into five detail categories. The classification process done based on the dataset and label where the schema to build dataset was proposed scientifically from this study. The contribution of this research is to offer the algorithm to collect and label the Indonesian language dataset and then classify the types of sarcasm, namely animal, psychology and stupidity, disabled person, attitude, and general bullying. The research hypothesis is that analysis from the classification results can be improved by classifying bully content into the five classes. Dataset was collected by the researcher and labelling was done manually based on study literature. The result proves the model can use to classify cyberbullying content in social media with 99.15% accuracy.

Features of Chinese Animalistic Prose on the Example of Gerel-Сhimeg Black Crane’s Novel Black Flame

The article examines the themes, images, and artistic features of the animalistic novel Black Flame (2006) by the Chinese writer of Mongolian origin Gerel-Сhimeg Black Сrane’s. The general and comparative analysis of the novel not only reveals the peculiarities of the author’s individual style, but also characterizes the general trends in the development of animalistic prose in China and abroad. Respect for the laws of nature, as well as the theme of love and devotion of an animal to man, run through the entire novel Black Flame as red threads. A characteristic feature of the work is the combination of scientific and artistic styles. Such qualities of the writer as truthfulness and subtle understanding of animal psychology are also remarkable. Among the features of Black Crane’s artistic style, one can note the poetic language enriched with original metaphors and epithets. Instead of the usual narration of the characters’ actions, Gerel-Chimeg focuses on the physical and mental sensations evoked by these actions and transmitted to the readers. The writer does not humanize animals, nevertheless, he manages to penetrate their inner world through the use of a rich arsenal of smells, sounds and even tactile sensations. Today, Gerel-Chimeg is an original and iconic figure among Chinese writers of this genre. The article emphasizes that animalistic literature of such a level plays an important role both in the study of the wild world as well as in the education of humanity in people. The novel Black Flame not only enriches our knowledge of nature and animals of northern and western China, but also evokes a powerful emotional response from the readers.

Game Theory in Biology

Game theory in biology seeks to predict social behaviour and other traits that influence how individuals interact. It does this by tentatively assuming that current traits are stable endpoints of evolution by natural selection. The theory is used to model aggressive behaviour, cooperation, negotiation, and signalling, as well as phenotypic attributes like an individual’s sex and mating type. This book covers the basic concepts and the traditional examples of biological game theory. It expands the frontiers of the field, emphasizing the importance of the co-evolution of traits and the implications of variation for reputation, markets, negotiation, and other social phenomena. It also highlights that it can be important to embed game interactions in the environment and an individual’s life. A major new direction developed in the book is that game theory can be extended by incorporating behavioural mechanisms, including mechanisms of reinforcement learning. By doing this the theory can successfully describe important phenomena like social dominance in group-living animals that previously have been difficult to model. By focusing on behavioural mechanisms, game theory can also make closer contact with empirical observation and with current research in fields like animal psychology and neuroscience.

For an ethics of experimentation. Moral arguments supporting 3Rs

A non-ideological approach to the moral questions posed by the use of animals for experimental purposes involves taking into account: i) the debate that has developed since the modern age on the ontological status of animals and on what is due to them or we must recognize; ii) the new frontiers of knowledge opened up by disciplines such as ethology, anthrozoology, animal psychology; iii) the arguments in support of or against experimentation with animals, referring also to new perspectives opened up by methodologies commonly defined as alternatives. Referring to the 3Rs, an important starting point is to critically consider the impasse generated by the conflict of interests between human and animal welfare or, in another respect, by the conflict of benefits for humans - costs for animals. Effective development of the 3Rs requires epistemological awareness and ethical competence as the assumption of responsibility by researchers and OPBA members for the well-being of humans and animals, giving reasons for the choices that are made.

The place of psychology in Whittaker’s circular classification of the sciences

This article discusses the place of psychology in Whittaker’s circular classification of the sciences. It is shown that it was Thomas Whittaker who undertook the first attempt to build a closed circular scheme on the basis of a linear series of sciences in 1903, fifteen years before Piaget. Whittaker decomposed psychology into two independent fundamental sciences (animal psychology and human psychology) and was able to preserve psychology’s connection with philosophy, social, and natural sciences. Whittaker’s approach shows that psychology may not be a holistic science. The fruitfulness of this approach is related to the fact that considering “psychological sciences” as different disciplines we are not obliged to construct a single subject matter of psychology.